BackgroundOlder adults are at risk for loneliness, and interventions to promote social connectedness are needed to directly address this problem. The nature of interventions aimed to affect the distinct, subjective concepts of loneliness/social connectedness has not been clearly described. The purpose of this review was to map the literature on interventions and strategies to affect loneliness/social connectedness for older adults.MethodsA comprehensive scoping review was conducted. Six electronic databases were searched from inception in July 2015, resulting in 5530 unique records. Standardized inclusion/exclusion criteria were applied, resulting in a set of 44 studies (reported in 54 articles) for further analysis. Data were extracted to describe the interventions and strategies, and the context of the included studies. Analytic techniques included calculating frequencies, manifest content analysis and meta-summary.ResultsInterventions were described or evaluated in 39 studies, and five studies described strategies to affect loneliness/social connectedness of older adults or their caregivers in a qualitative descriptive study. The studies were often conducted in the United States (38.6%) among community dwelling (54.5%), cognitively intact (31.8%), and female-majority (86.4%) samples. Few focused on non-white participants (4.5%). Strategies described most often were engaging in purposeful activity and maintaining contact with one’s social network. Of nine intervention types identified, the most frequently described were One-to-One Personal Contact and Group Activity. Authors held divergent views of why the same type of intervention might impact social connectedness, but social contact was the most frequently conceptualized influencing factor targeted, both within and across intervention types.ConclusionsResearch to test the divergent theories of why interventions work is needed to advance understanding of intervention mechanisms. Innovative conceptualizations of intervention targets are needed, such as purposeful activity, that move beyond the current focus on the objective social network as a way to promote social connectedness for older adults.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (10.1186/s12877-018-0897-x) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

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Two cross-sectional studies (N = 70; N = 91) used a replication design to investigate the degree to which adult Francophone ESL learners' use of tense/aspect markers in past contexts supported the predictions of the aspect hypothesis (Andersen & Shirai, 1994;Bardovi-Harlig, 1994) and the degree to which it showed L1 influence. Consistent with the aspect hypothesis, the learners were significantly more successful in using simple past with telics, struggled most with statives, and, in their nontarget responses, preferred progressive for activities and present for statives. The role of the L1 was restricted to the learners' association of nontarget perfect (a French-influenced form) with telics. The interpretation of the findings takes into account methodological issues and developmental constraints.

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The purpose of this study was to determine whether it is possible to distinguish between "difficult" and "easy" constructions for second language (L2) learners by examining characteristics of the structures as they occur in aural input. In a multidimensional analysis of 3 English structures with different acquisition profiles-the simple past, possessive determiners his/her , and the progressive aspect-we examined the phonological, morphosyntactic, and lexicosemantic characteristics of the forms as they occurred in a 110,000-word corpus of instructional talk to L2 learners. We analyzed the type/token distributions of the forms, their lexical properties, and their perceptual salience. Our findings revealed key input factors that distinguished between the early-acquired progressive, on the one hand, and the later-acquired past and his/her determiners, on the other hand. These results lend support to theoretical accounts of the input-acquisition relationship and also generate hypotheses for manipulating instructional input to increase the salience of opaque constructions. WHAT CONTRIBUTES TO MAKINGA LINguistic structure easy or difficult to acquire? More The Modern Language Journal, 93, iii, (2009) 0026-7902/09/336-353 $1.50/0 C 2009 The Modern Language Journalspecifically, what can a close examination of the spoken input to which learners are exposed tell us about this easy/difficult conundrum? To address this issue, we took a multidimensional approach to the analysis of a 110,000-word corpus of teacher talk to second language (L2) learners, in contexts where the classroom constituted the